The class will last throughout the month of November, I suppose to coincide with National Novel Writing Month or “NaNoWriMo” (though we won’t be writing a novel).

There’s a private, dedicated Facebook page for the class, as well as a discussion list where students can communicate with each other and Jagi.

We’ve been teamed up in small groups of writers who are attracted to similar genres (in my case, science fiction and fantasy). We receive an assignment each week, and after we respond to the assignment, we share it with our other group members. We make suggestions on each other’s work, edit our own work accordingly, and then turn it in to Jagi.

Oh, one of the group members doesn’t have Word, so we’re collaborating using Google Docs, which is an interesting experience, since it’s totally new to me.

I have no idea what happens after that, because we’re still in the middle of the first assignment.

Although it’s gotten several “likes,” no one has ventured to comment. That happens sometimes, and I suppose it doesn’t have to mean anything, but this story does have an overtly Christian character. He has volunteered to fight in the Vietnam War, both because he’s already had friends drafted into the service who have been sent over and died, and because he believes that as a Marine, he has to fight in our wars to keep the people back home, especially his family, safe, and so our nation can remain free.

Now those are all ideas that have fallen out of favor lately (or not so lately). I did have another character in the tale comment on how the Vietnam War did nothing to protect our nation’s people or their freedom. However, it wasn’t so much the purpose of the war that’s at issue, but rather my male protagonist having a certain set of values and a code of honor to uphold.

I’m delighted to be the first person (on Amazon) to review the Planetary Anthology: Venus. I’ve been aware of the Superversive SF movement and their publications for a few years now, but this is the first opportunity I’ve had to review any of their works apart from God, Robot.

Each anthology in the series takes the theme of a particular planet or other major body in our solar system and asks contributors to create a short story on that theme. In this case, it can be about the planet Venus, but it can also be about the mythological goddess, or even on the wider topic of love and romance (with or without the SciFi/Fantasy elements).

One of the motivations for reading an anthology is to become exposed to a wider variety of authors (twenty in the case of “Venus”) and then decide which ones you like well enough to read more of their works.

I downloaded “Venus” onto my Kindle Fire and spent a few weeks of lunch hours reading stories and taking notes.